Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is one of the best online tools for increasing your website’s reach. Cheaper than advertising –– although you might have to pay out for some training in how to use SEO before you begin — it has the potential to help you reach thousands or even millions of potential customers by making sure you appear higher in the lists of results produced by search engines like Yahoo or Google.
SEO is very complicated behind the scenes, and there are advanced ways to promote your website, but the way it works is actually pretty simple. Once you have found a Delaware SEO company, like http://delawareseoguy.com, or a college in California that runs a course in the basics, you and your staff can get started boosting your business.
Keywords and Search Engines
Think about how you would go about searching for that Delaware company for a moment. When you get to your search engine of choice, you would probably enter something like “Delaware SEO training” perhaps adding the name of your local town or city to narrow the searches even further.
The words that you have typed are what is known in search engine optimization as keywords; the words and phrases that help you — and the search engine – narrow down the hundreds of millions of websites out there into a list that is actually useful to you as the searcher.
Analysis of websites by SEO specialists has found that when people are looking for common products and services, they tend to use the same keywords — and even type them in the same order. Therefore, if you know or can calculate what these keywords are, and make sure they are included in the text on your website prominently, then you will match more searches and be located higher in the results returned by search engines.
Get a Boost from Backlinks
However, if you are searching for a very common keyword such as “holiday” or “automobile,” there are still going to be many millions of websites that will match these. How do Bing, Google, and other search engines decide which websites will be placed higher in the list of results they return?
This is where backlinks come into the equation. If a company’s website is featured somewhere else on the internet, perhaps in an advert or referenced in a review, then this is a backlink, and the more backlinks a site has, the higher it will appear in the search results. It is a way of filtering the search results for quality, working on the assumption that a website that is advertised or mentioned a lot elsewhere is more established. If you are running SEO for a business or organization, then you need to try and get your website address out there in other places — blog posts and forums are one cheap and easy way to do this.
Quality and quantity
As well as checking for the quality of a website by using backlinks, search engines also carry out complicated analysis of websites to calculate how long, on average, people spend on sites when they are directed there. If they only spend a few seconds on a site before moving on or returning to the list of search results, then the algorithm run by search engines make the assumption that this site has not actually met the searcher’s demands — and that is, therefore, unlikely to meet the demands of future searchers using those same keywords.
However, if you spend time on the website, perhaps even clicking through to additional pages on its internal menus, then the search engine remembers this next time someone uses those same keywords and places it higher in the list. This is an incentive to produce not only a website that delivers what your customers are likely to be looking for, but also to make sure that your webpage is attractive, with colorful images, and that it is easy to use. Your site may have great content but if potential customers cannot find it they will soon move on — moving your site further down the search list.
Some of this technical jargon may be a little bit daunting to those who are not as IT savvy as SEO experts. If you decide you want to employ an SEO specialist to make changes to your company’s website, their success or otherwise comes down to a very simple equation, one that even can be made without any technical knowledge: have more people been visiting your site and have you been making more sales online?